Today, digital signage contributes significantly to marketing and advertisement campaigns worldwide. Digital signage makes use of electronic display devices, such as smart posters, in order to display, among others, advertising messages at retail stores, hotels, restaurants, corporate buildings, metro stations, airports, and many more locations.
Traditional advertising posters and billboards can easily be equipped with near field communication (NFC) tags, so that they effectively become NFC-enabled smart posters. It is relatively easy to attach an NFC tag containing the required content to a poster if the content displayed on the poster, for example an advertising message, is static. The NFC tag will then contain, for example, a uniform resource locator (URL) to the website of the company or the product in the advertising message. In that case, the website may be accessed automatically when a user taps the NFC tag with an NFC-enabled mobile device. However, with newer digital signage, which features a sequence or stream (narrowcasting) of advertising messages, this is no longer possible. As the displayed message changes, the content of an accompanying NFC tag should—but does not—change accordingly.
This problem persists even if the NFC tag contains a URL that points to a particular website that somehow “knows” which content is currently being displayed and redirects the user to the proper URL for that advertising message. Since the URL may be opened by the NFC-enabled mobile device at a later moment in time, in which case the content that is currently being shown may not be the content that the user was interested in, it cannot be guaranteed that the correct website is opened. For example, opening the URL at a later moment in time may be necessary in case the smart poster is located where the internet connectivity is relatively low. As another example, the smart poster may comprise a stand-alone display system that is started at some point in time; in that case the exact advertising message that is being shown at a particular moment in time cannot be known outside the system itself.
U.S. Pat. No. 8,126,505 B2 describes an NFC-enabled telecommunications communication device that is mounted behind the touch point of a smart poster. The content data downloadable from the smart poster is managed remotely, monitored and usage data of the smart poster analyzed at a server via the telecommunications device. Furthermore, a method is described to remotely synchronize visual images displayed on a display of the smart poster with the content output from an NFC device of the smart poster. However, this synchronization is performed under control of a remote server, and therefore requires and depends on a connection to said remote server.